State and Local

March 20, 2014 — Two commercial fishing zones off Massachusetts are among the nine dirtiest in the country, an advocacy group has found in a report slated for release Thursday.

The culprit, according to the advocacy groupOceana , is bycatch — or the fish and ocean wildlife that commercial fishermen are not targeting but that end up in their nets.

According to the report, nine US fisheries, including two off Massachusetts, are responsible for more than half the nation’s reported bycatch. These fish are often discarded at sea, “likely already dead or dying,” creating the dirty effect, the report says.

Oceana contends that bycatch is “one of the most significant threats to maintaining healthy marine ecosystems.”

The two Massachusetts-area zones are the Northeast Bottom Trawl Fishery, where more than 50 million pounds of fish are thrown overboard each year, and the New England & Mid-Atlantic Gillnet Fishery, where more than 2,000 dolphins, porpoises, and seals were caught in nets as bycatch in 2010, according to Oceana.

Read the full story at The Boston Globe 

March 19, 2014 — The following was released by the Maine Department of Marine Resources:

The 2014 elver fishing season will begin Sunday, April 6, 2014 at noon. Originally scheduled to begin on March 22, 2014, the season opening has been delayed due to deliberations over the two bills impacting the fishery, LD 1723 signed into law by Governor LePage Thursday, March 13, and LD 1625, signed into law on Tuesday, March 18.
 
“The cold weather is expected to delay elver runs this season, so the late start will likely have little impact on landings,” said Colonel Joseph Fessenden, Chief of the Maine Marine Patrol.
 
The additional time is required by the Department of Marine Resources to implement necessary emergency rulemaking to allocate individual fishing quotas to Maine’s non-tribal elver harvesters, to obtain information from Maine’s federally recognized Indian tribes necessary for allocation of individual fishing quota to licensed tribal members, and to distribute new elver transaction cards.
 
LD 1723 established the elver transaction “swipe” card system, used for the first time this season. Similar to a credit card, it has a magnetic stripe on the back that is encoded by DMR staff with identifying information for each harvester, which along with the transaction information including weight and price paid, will be uploaded to a secure database and monitored by the Department to ensure the state does not exceed its quota of 11,749 pounds.
 
Of the 11,749 lbs, Marine Resources Commissioner Patrick Keliher is authorized to withhold up to ten percent to provide a buffer that helps prevent the state from exceeding the overall quota. The Commissioner has chosen to withhold 5 percent from both non-tribal and tribal allocations, which leaves a total quota for the state of 11,161 pounds.
 
The Department will be issuing each license holder a transaction card and will be providing dealers with card readers that are used to record and upload transaction details. This outreach will require a minimum of two weeks, as the Department plans to issue the cards at several locations around the state for the convenience of license holders.  These locations are currently being determined and will be communicated in writing to license holders.
 
LD 1625 authorizes the Commissioner to establish, by emergency rule, an elver fishing quota for the state. The new quota-based approach is the result of an agreement crafted by Commissioner Keliher with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the interstate compact that establishes the regulatory framework for member states. The agreement established a quota for Maine during the 2014 season that is 35 percent less than the 2013 season dealer-reported landings, which totaled 18,076 pounds.
 
Per LD 1625, 21.9 percent of the overall annual quota will be allocated to Maine’s federally recognized Indian tribes. Of the 21.9 percent, the Passamaquoddy Tribe will be allocated 14 percent of the overall annual quota, while the Penobscot Nation will be allocated 6.4 percent of the overall annual quota, the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians will be allocated 1.1 percent, and the Aroostook Band of Micmacs will be allocated 0.4 percent of the overall annual quota. Five percent will be withheld from each tribe’s allocation as a buffer
 
The law requires that each tribe provide documentation to the department of the allocation for each individual license holder. There are 48 Penobscot Nation license holders, 16 Houlton Band of Maliseet license holders and 8 members of the Aroostook Band of Micmacs. LD 1625 authorizes the Passamaquoddy tribe to issue an unlimited number of licenses, of which six can use fyke nets and the remainder must use dip nets.
 
The remaining 79.1 percent of the overall annual quota will be allocated to 436 non-tribal eligible license holders based on calculations currently under consideration by the Commissioner.
 
The Department will issue notification of the individual fishing quotas to licensed harvesters as well as instructions for distribution of the elver transaction swipe cards in the coming week.
 
The season will end May 31, 2014 or prior to that date if the state’s overall quota is reached.

 

March 20, 2014 — Last night the Kodiak City Council and Borough Assembly met for a joint work session and discussed Gulf of Alaska trawl bycatch management at length.

In April the North Pacific Fishery Management Council will take up the bycatch issue, and try to develop some sort of management plan to help reduce it within the trawl industry. On Monday, the Kodiak Fisheries Work Group heard public comments, panel discussion and guest presentations on the matter and ultimately drafted a list of community goals that align with elements of the fishery management council’s framework motion on bycatch.

That drafted list was before the island’s two governing bodies last night, and Kodiak’s fisheries analyst, Heather McCarty, emphasized that the entire list is mere suggestions to the council for further analysis on certain issues. 

“Everything in this outline is asking for analysis or continued analysis of the elements of the framework motion and any additional elements that you might add. It’s not expressing support for those elements.”

Read the full story and listen to the audio at KMXT

March 19, 2014 — With about two months left in Florida’s stone crab harvest season, get ready to empty your wallet if you want to dine on the state’s signature seafood delicacy.

Prices are the highest in recent memory, according to restaurateurs and seafood dealers around the state, and they’re not expected to drop much before the season closes May 15.

At world-renowned Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach, you will shell out about $90 for 1 1/2 pounds of jumbos. For large, figure about $60; mediums — the smallest — are about $30 for just under a pound.

“It’s getting crazy,” acknowledged Steve Sawitz, chief operating officer of Joe’s.

Across town at Truluck’s Seafood, Steak and Crab House in Miami, all-you-can eat large stone crabs cost $99 per person.

“The highest I’ve ever seen it,” manager Ed Tanner said.

Even if you drive to takeout markets at Keys Fisheries in Marathon or Triad Seafood Market in Everglades City, you’ll pay about $38 per pound for jumbos down to about $17 for mediums.

Read the full story at the Miami Herald

 

 

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/19/4004924/craving-seasonal-stone-crabs-get.html#storylink=cpy  

March 18, 2014 — It’s obvious to Chris Blankenship, Director of the Alabama Marine Resources Division, that recreational fishing surveys conducted by the federal government are unable to provide accurate data on the red snapper catch off Alabama.

That is why Blankenship has asked the Alabama Conservation Advisory Board to approve a regulation that would establish a system for anglers who catch red snapper off Alabama to report their catches to Marine Resources.

“The reporting of red snapper regulation would require people to report how many red snapper they kept after each trip during snapper season,” Blankenship said. “We want to make it as easy on the fishermen as possible to report their catches. We will have a Smartphone app similar to Game Check that will require a little less information and easier-to-input information. If you don’t have a Smartphone where you can use your app, you can use your touch-tone phone. You’ll need your boat registration number, how many people you had onboard and how many red snapper you caught and kept.”

Because of Alabama’s limited shoreline, Marine Resources will be able to use boat ramps as intercept sites for the survey as well.

“In the event somebody doesn’t have a phone to use or the battery goes dead or whatever, we’ll have drop-boxes at Boggy Point, Cotton Bayou, Fort Morgan and Billy Goat Hole on Dauphin Island,” Blankenship said. “We’ll have paper forms with a carbon copy for people to fill out their information and put it in the drop-boxes. They’ll tear off the carbon and keep it.”

Blankenship said Marine Resources is testing the system right now to make sure the bugs are worked out if the Conservation Advisory Board approves the request.

Read the full story at the Courier Journal 

AUGUSTA, Maine — March 18, 2014 — Maine’s elver season will start two weeks late to give the state time to implement an emergency law enacted Tuesday by lawmakers that gives it more authority over the industry.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Walter Kumiega, D-Deer Isle, House chairman of the Legislature’s Marine Resources Committee, passed unanimously in the House and Senate. It was a quick, quiet passage for the bill after a tenuous few months that saw Maine Indian tribes calling it discriminatory.

By Tuesday, tension had cooled on the issue of the glassy, baby American eels, a delicacy in Japan, where the domestic elver market tanked after a 2011 tsunami, driving up prices from $25 per pound toward $2,000 per pound in Maine, one of two American states that allow elver fishing.

The law allows the Maine Department of Marine Resources to establish an annual weight quota for the elver harvest, allocating individual quotas to harvesters of the eels.

After concern over the fishery’s health was expressed by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the department agreed earlier this year to slash Maine’s total 2014 elver catch by 35 percent from last year’s, to nearly 11,750 pounds. Another law passed this year allows a swipe-card system for fishermen that will yield daily reporting data and make illegal harvesting more difficult, according to the commission.

Peter Steele, a spokesman for Gov. Paul LePage, said the department was pushing the season back from its normal start date of March 22 to April 5 in order to implement elements of the new laws. The limit is expected to affect the catch more than the length of the season.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

March 19, 2014 — The National Marine Fisheries Service used sub-standard methods of data collection and violated the rule of federal law when it failed to consider alternatives to its preferred catch limits or how those alternatives would affect fishing communities, Massachusetts has charged in its most recent filing of its lawsuit against federal fishing regulators.

Those charges are at the heart of the lawsuit the state filed last May 30 against then-Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and her department’s fishing regulators — NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service — in the wake of unprecedented cuts in the 2013 available catch limits for cod and other species historically elemental to groundfishermen from Gloucester and elsewhere.

The suit, filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley, contends that those Draconian cuts — 77 percent in the allowable landings of Gulf of Maine cod — were based on questionable science and instituted without proper regard for the adverse economic they would create for fishermen and fishing communities.

The federal government has until March 28 to file its final reply brief and then the case will move to oral arguments before U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns renders his judgment.

Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times